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Excerpt from Sometimes I Think About It, by Stephen Elliott
Jimmy Wallet Is Buried Alive Here is a photograph, undated. Jimmy Wallet is seated, his face turned, the sharp lines of his chin and jaw like an alligator that doesn’t bite. He’s terrifically handsome,...
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Stephen Elliott: The TNB Self-Interview
The last time I interviewed you you were in the midst of a nasty breakup. You were nervous, constantly looking over your shoulder, scouting for an exit. I thought, this guy is either a crackhead or...
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Hybridity
For Beachcombers Who Are Tired of Performing Normal Surrealism runs through the streets. —Gabriel Garcia Marquez I stood in front of the bank teller this morning, trying to perform normal....
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Excerpt of The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide, by Gayle...
Thirty-seven weeks pregnant and I can’t seem to stop crying. This is unusual for me. I tend to be an optimistic person. Relentlessly so. Probably obnoxiously so. I tend to be not just a glass-half-full...
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Gayle Brandeis: The TNB Self-Interview
Photo credit: Camera RAW photography How did writing this book change you? I started to drink coffee and booze for the first time in my adult life during the writing of this book. There isn’t a direct...
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Totoro’s Sad
I jump at the sound of my husband’s voice, am doubly startled when I turn to encounter the unblinking eyes of our daughter’s puppet peeking around the kitchen doorway. “Totoro’s sad,” Puppet says....
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Sorting
Sweat rolls down my back and pools into my bra. It’s mid-June in southern Missouri, the heat and humidity an oppressive blanket. Inside, my throat feels clogged with desiccated leaves; a lump the...
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Excerpt from The Book of Resting Places, by Thomas Mira y Lopez
My mother announces that when she dies, she wants to be buried like the pharaohs. We talk over the phone and I imagine her sitting in what used to be my father’s green chair, surveying the frames and...
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Thomas Mira y Lopez: The TNB Self-Interview
I imagined this as the book interviewing itself and so the questions and answers here are taken directly from the ten essays in The Book of Resting Places. Questions and answers are inverted so that...
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James P. McCollom: The TNB Self-Interview
“Violence and the vote“ are huge issues for modern America. But how does The Last Sheriff In Texas, this story of a sheriff’s election in Beeville, Texas, in 1952, provide a metaphor — an explanation —...
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Impromptu
On May 4, 2006, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency published a list essay by Dan Wiencek called “Thirteen Writing Prompts.” Prompt #1: “Write a scene showing a man and a woman arguing over the man’s...
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Joseph Osmundson: The TNB Self-Interview
How? I got my heart broken and tried to fix it by sitting down in front of an empty Word Document. It didn’t work. How do you feel? Tired. How do you feel now that Inside/Out is out? Terrified. I...
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How to Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years
1. Choose a horrific moment in history you know little about, in a country, Argentina, you know little about, but which seems to have troubling similarities to the here and now. Research for years....
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Mailing a Graphic Novel
This is a comic. Not really. But okay. Comics aren’t Media Mail. What? Go across the street, right there. To the comics store. They’ll tell you. They do all their comics parcel post. But these don’t...
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Separation
Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color. S. Merwin Girl Mother Memory: Six stories high. Will she make a sound as she flies?...
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Excerpt of Hacking Trump, by Ranbir Sidhu
Fuck it. We Lost. Or, an Old Man Burns in a Chair Days before the November 8 election, while driving through rural New England, I was invited to, of all things, a Guy Fawkes Night celebration—the...
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Ranbir Sidhu: The TNB Self-Interview
So what fucking possessed you? A Trump book, I mean really. My publisher, Unnamed Press, called me last January and we both wanted to do something against Trump and his minions. We threw around a few...
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Excerpt of Hacking Trump, by Ranbir Sidhu, Part II
“What’s going on over here?!!” Donald J. Trump, moments before body-slamming Vince McMahon, 04/01/07 There’s perhaps no better arena to understand the spectacle at the heart of Donald Trump than the...
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Excerpt of The Milk Lady of Bangalore, by Shoba Narayan
The elevator door opens. A cow stands inside, angled diagonally to fit. It doesn’t look uncomfortable, merely impatient. I reflexively move forward, and then stop, trying not to gape. “It is for the...
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Shoba Narayan’s Cow, Ananda Lakshmi: The TNB Self-Interview
How do you feel now that the book is out? Like a cow jumped over the moon. Like I have landed on pesticide-free virgin grass, which for a cow like me, is bovine heaven. After all, there aren’t too...
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